A. Pawlowski, TODAY Parents, NBC (November 2014)

Babies enjoying a little “Twist and Shout” have some important lessons to share about bonding and the power of music.Those who were bounced to a melody while also watching a stranger move in sync to the same beat were much more helpful to that stranger afterwards than to adults who were out of sync or didn’t move at all, according to a study published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Katharine Gammon, Scientific American (October 2014)

Graham Rockingham, The Hamilton Spectator (September 2014)

Mac’s LIVElab welcomes the public for a test drive.

McMaster University is now home to one of the most-sophisticated, high-tech concert venues in the world. As a matter of fact, the new LIVElab at the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind (MIMM), maybe one of the finest listening rooms in the world.

Ivan Semeniuk, The Globe and Mail (September 2014)

Before the iPod, the Sony Walkman or the home stereo system, music was something people made and experienced with other people.The universal nature of music-making, which occurs in every culture throughout the ages, suggests evolution may have wired us for it, and that the survival benefit it confers has something to do with the way social groups cohere. But such ideas are speculative and the social dimension of music remains largely unexplored.

Dr. Laurel Trainor, National Geographic Magazine (November, 2013)

At last count, 25 million people had viewed aÂÂÂ YouTube clip of an infant smiling tearfully while her mother sings a bittersweet Rod Stewart ballad. While that’s only anecdotal evidence of music’s power, science also suggests that music taps into something deep inside the human brain even before we can talk.

To learn more about how babies respond to music, National Geographic interviewed Dr. Laurel Trainor, Director of McMaster University’s Institute for Music and the Mind in Hamilton, Ontario.